


free and young and we can feel none of it.

by chemicalpixie



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Body Focused Repetitive Behavior, Forced Prostitution, Gen, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Past Violence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recreational Drug Use, being a career victor is hard. it's hard and nobody understands.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:40:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22658704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chemicalpixie/pseuds/chemicalpixie
Summary: “the career victors’ shine never wears off. the show never ends. enobaria will always have to be a pretty little capitol plaything.”or; enobaria and what it's like to be a career victor after your games.
Relationships: Cashmere & Enobaria (Hunger Games), Cashmere & Gloss, Enobaria & Finnick O'dair, Enobaria & Gloss (Hunger Games), Gloss (Hunger Games)/Original Character(s)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 38





	free and young and we can feel none of it.

**Author's Note:**

> hoo boy this is a hell of a fic. it's mostly just. like. 2000 words of career victor bonding post games and enobaria bitching abt being a career victor and honestly? that's so valid of her tbh. anyway i mostly wrote this bc i missed writing enobaria ( after i, you know, wrote a 22.6k fic about her ) and i just have a lot of feelings about victor friendships. particularly gloss and cashmere and eno and finnick because they all end up back in the arena together and only one of them is left after the victor's purge. think about that for a second and tell me it doesn't make you want to walk into the ocean. i might add more to this later, but. i don't know. it feels done for now, so here it is. mind the warnings and stay safe, as usual with careers/thg content there's lots of triggers, and your health comes first <3
> 
> the title is from “sedated” by hozier. the song cashmere is singing i took lyrics from kesha's unreleased track “throw em up (woo hoo!),” because kesha's music ( and, to an extent, kesha herself ) reminds me a lot of cashmere. anyways. kudos and comment if you like it, it'd mean a lot to me.

the older victors call them the ‘young victor’s club.’ it’s not all the young victors, by any means, but it's most of them. it's enough. they’re mostly careers and victors who ran with the pack — cashmere, who won the year after enobaria did, gloss, the year after that, fawn, the year before enobaria, finnick, who won the sixty-fifth, and hadn’t been with the pack, but was popular enough as a victor that he might as well have, and then there’s petra and silver and arsinoe and selkie, who all won after fifty-four, which glitter won. 

after she won, enobaria hadn’t been surprised by the clients. the academy hadn’t said, not explicitly, but there’s only so many times they can make you practice kissing with the boys in your year and making sure that it shows off all your best features before you begin to put two and two together. so the long and short of it was that she hadn’t been surprised. she gets the impression that glitter and silver and cashmere all knew what was coming, too. cashmere especially, if her reaction to gloss being chosen as tribute and then subsequently crowned victor was any indication. he's three minutes older than her, but she's never stopped protecting him. so enobaria hadn't been surprised, not by a long shot, nor had any of the other victors from one and two. not like fawn and finnick and selkie had been. finnick, at least, has been protected from the capitol’s claws slightly — though not completely, by his age. she knows that he was still technically a virgin on his sixteenth birthday, but that hadn’t stopped many of the photographers and editors and agents and stylists who’d gotten him wrapped up in his modelling talent from toeing that line.

she hates it. she’d never say it out loud, but... she hates it. 

so instead she spends her time in the capitol for the games drunk on whiskey and high on whatever new drug nicky can get them. one of the perks of running with a fan favorite victor is that he's always got free samples of the latest shit. 

that’s how she ended up here now, lounging upside-down on a chair in cashmere’s bedroom, coming down from her latest high. cashmere's room, much like the rest of the one suite, is painfully bright, everything all done up in shades of white and gold. enobaria's room in two's suite is darker, mostly reds and blacks. her bathroom, too, is done up in black tile — too much red and white reminds her of the arena and after the third gasping, shaking panic attack after she'd sliced her mouth open and tried to clean herself up, agrippa had had them retile her bathroom in black marble. 

nicky and cas are lying on the bed, and he has his arms wrapped around cashmere like she’s his lifeline. selkie’s on the bed, too, her long, gangly limbs that she never quite grew into sprawled over finnick and cashmere’s intertwined bodies. gloss is in the bathroom puking into the toilet, and arsinoe is doing the same, but into the tub. fawn’s nearly passed out on the other chair, her eyes fluttering every now and then, which reassures enobaria that she doesn’t need to get up and make sure she’s alive. glitter’s sitting on the floor, staring into the floor-length mirror as though she doesn’t recognize her own face, and petra and silver are petting each other’s hair on floor next to her, looking for all the world like one of the cheap capitol knockoff victor pornos that people who are too poor to afford having sex with a _real_ victor watch. they can’t pay us to get them off, enobaria muses, so they’ll pay to pretend they can watch us get each other off. enobaria wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, the bright red stain of blood marring her skin.

the threesomes are always the worst. they take something private, something intimate, and turn it into a show. once, after she’d had to do a threesome with gloss and a client, she’d gone on a bender that had culminated in her puking in an alley and nearly ripping a capitolite’s throat out when they shoved a camera in her face to take photos and she probably would’ve if iggy hadn’t found her and dragged her back to two’s suite kicking and screaming. agrippa had been about ready to rip enobaria’s throat out that time. she’d been mia for two days after a client meeting, and the first rule of being a victor after ‘ _sit still look pretty and bring honor to your district and do whatever they tell you_ ’ is ‘ _don’t vanish after client meetings_ ’. the older victors make sure to check in with each other, and make their victors check in with them, and everyone goes to sleep safe and sound knowing that today isn’t the day their pretty little victor snapped and murdered a client.

cashmere sits up, focusing on something for the first time that evening. “opal’s gonna kill me for that!” she snaps at enobaria, who realizes she’s wiped the blood from her mouth all over the chair she’s seated in.

glitter snaps out of her trance on the floor and rolls her eyes. “not as much as ‘llura’s gonna kill me. she’s always on about how ‘i’m the oldest’ and thus ‘i need to keep the younger victors in line’. like, if i didn’t have to take some rando’s cock up my fucking ass every five minutes, i’d consider trying to stay sober enough to keep a handle on things.” enobaria bites back a cackle-laugh at that. she's right. 

enobaria’s jealous, sometimes, of the outlying victors. they get a few shiny years of fame, and then the shine wears off and they get to go home and then no one cares how drunk or high they are or how presentable they look and it’s a bad year if they have more than two clients per games. 

the career victors’ shine never wears off. the show never ends. enobaria will always have to be a pretty little capitol plaything.

gloss emerges from the bathroom, shaking his shiny blonde hair off like a dog would. enobaria snarls at him — it’s instinct, really. it doesn’t mean anything. gloss knows that, and he winks at her, as though she couldn’t use those teeth to bite his dick off. not that she _would_ , but it’s the principle of the thing. arsinoe emerges from the bathroom a second later, drying her hair off with one of cashmere’s pristine white towels. arsinoe is petite, a good few inches shorter than enobaria herself, with shoulder-length brown hair that has splinters of gold when the sun hits it that's cut into a choppy bob. they're games-sisters. agrippa had brought both of them home, and arsinoe had hated enobaria at first. but enobaria thinks arsinoe doesn't hate her anymore. or, at least, she isn't actively antagonizing her, which enobaria guesses is the closest arsinoe gets to love. 

“your turn, merie,” gloss says, tossing a towel at cashmere. “get it all out and then take a shower before you say something that all of us are going to regret.”

cashmere sticks her tongue out at him. “you can’t tell me what to do, glossy.”

“were the two of you having sex?” nicky asks, half-sitting up and marveling at arsinoe.

arsinoe glares. “as everyone knows, the absolute best time for sex is when you’re cleaning vomit out of each other’s hair and coming down from a high,” she deadpans, and enobaria snickers. “it was so romantic.”

gloss cackles and shoves her. arsinoe stumbles over to the bed, collapsing over selkie's sprawled body. selkie wraps her arms around arsinoe protectively. gloss collapses in the seat next to enobaria. “long night?” she drawls, not expecting an answer. 

there's a long pause. 

“she wanted me to pretend she was ambrosia,” he mutters, and enobaria stares at him for a moment before she remembers. his district partner. the one cashmere says he was half in love with. 

“shit, man,” enobaria mutters. “that blows. i'm really sorry.” she's never known anything like the love gloss had had for his district partner. the closest she's ever come to love was fucking juno blake in one of the broom closets at the academy after their first kill tests. she remembers the blood under juno's nails, and she remembers that they'd said approximately five words to each other after.

“i never wanted this,” gloss mutters. “i didn't want to go into the games.” enobaria bites her lip. she doesn't know what to say. there's a long pause, and then the music chip player starts blasting. 

“ _— i live my life like I've been raised by wolves; y'all already know i'm a fucking animal —_ ” cashmere half-sings, half-croons from the music chip player.

“turn that shit _off_!” cashmere snaps, leaning over and turning it off, toppling the tiny music chip player in the process. the chip falls out of the player and shatters into two pieces.

“sorry, cas,” nicky says, looking suitably chastised. 

“you write those lyrics yourself?” arsinoe asks, a wicked smirk marring her face. 

“i sing whatever they tell me to,” cashmere says distantly from her spot where she's perched at the head of the bed. she twirls a lock of hair around her finger absentmindedly. the capitol thinks of cashmere as some kind of drugged-up party girl, and her songs reinforce that. it makes sense, then, enobaria thinks, that she didn't write them herself.

gloss pushes himself up, reaching for cashmere. enobaria can see the shimmers of the beginning of tears in her eyes. “c'mon, merie,” he murmurs, leading her to the bathroom. cashmere follows wordlessly. 

no one says anything for a long time, and the silence hangs heavy in the room. 

“i’m really sorry,” nicky says, and selkie wraps her arms around him like a starfish and pets his hair gently. his age shows on his face then. he’s only been out of the arena for not even two full years, and he’s already a fan favorite. if enobaria had been his mentor, well, he wouldn’t have even gone into the arena, for one. the committee would never let a fourteen year old into the arena, but she digresses. if enobaria had been his mentor, she’d’ve told him to die early on. make it look like a fight, but... it would’ve been better that way. she knows the ones do it, when they think their tribute can’t handle it. sometimes they listen, sometimes they don’t, but at least they go into their victory with some kind of warning. nicky never had that.

and if enobaria knows one thing, she knows that one of these days she’s going to find all of the capitolites who ever paid a penny to touch him, and she’s going to rip out all their fucking throats.


End file.
